My Walmart is begging people to come get vaccinated for free in my 40% fully vaccinated state. I say send the vaccines where they will be used and cherished.
Have you talked to anyone not getting vaccinated in your state to try and gather why?
Despite sort of the popular media push that there's some huge contingent of never-vaxxers, that actually appears to be a small proportion of the unvaccinated[1].
Are the remainder having doubts? Is it a transport/scheduling issue? Is there a misunderstanding about it being a multiple dose vaccine?
I'll speak for myself here - I'm not interested in getting it because I've already had COVID.
I know several others who feel this way. Most of them are making the assumption that they have lasting immunity, but I'm going so far as to have my antibody levels checked. It's been several months and they are still in excess of what would be expected from having been vaccinated, so I see no benefit to getting vaccinated.
Further, there are reports of vaccine reactions being more common and more severe in people who have recovered from COVID. It's important to note that "reports of" does not mean "confirmed reports of". That said, I've not yet found anything that leads me to believe that there is a net benefit to my being vaccinated.
A quick glance at the CDC's site shows that ~35m - or ~10% of the US - have been infected to this point.
35mm cases have been confirmed using tests. Considering the vast majority of those who become infected with covid fail to display any symptoms whatsoever and are thus unlikely to be tested, this is very much a lower bound.
Of course, there's plenty of overlap between those vaccinated and those with natural immunity, so you can't just sum the numbers, but with ~70% vaccinated, we have to be approaching some kind of herd immunity level at this point.
> Most of them are making the assumption that they have lasting immunity, but I'm going so far as to have my antibody levels checked. It's been several months and they are still in excess of what would be expected from having been vaccinated, so I see no benefit to getting vaccinated.
Wouldn't getting vaccinated then be comparable to vaccine + booster, giving you even better protection?
> I'm going so far as to have my antibody levels checked
I didn't know you could do this. How do you get your antibody levels checked?
I have blood drawn quarterly to keep tabs on a potential issue that runs in my family, and it’s just an added test I asked to have performed. I don’t know how much it costs off the top of my head, but I get it done through Quest Diagnostics.
The typical report is binary - you either have antibodies or you don’t. I had to specifically request additional detail, but it was available.
In my experience they are just anxious about getting something they don't understand, doing nothing is super easy/comfortable, and some media scares the last bit of uncertainty out of them.
Speaking from my own point of view, the reason I'm not getting the vaccines is in large part driven by how obvious it seems that the push is not about public health.
For one bit of the large body of evidence of this, that restrictions on those who are unvaccinated are applied even to those who have natural immunity, which is durable and robust, and almost certainly longer-lasting than vaccine immunity (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...), means to me that there is something else afoot rather than merely public health.
To boot, I am very healthy, not fat, get plenty of vitamin D and fresh air, and am thus basically more at risk from driving to the store than from covid, though it's hard to say for sure what the real numbers are--suffice to say, the risk does not meet the threshold I'd need for me to take any action beyond just getting fitter and healthier and happier every day--which I'd try to do anyway.
I understand frustration and skepticism about the politics of covid response, but I don't understand that as a motivation to decline the vaccine.
While the risk of death from the virus is low for healthy people, it's far, far higher than the risk posed by the virus. Further, many healthy people do get seriously ill (and some die) from the virus including cases of long-lasting side-effects (inability to exercise due to damage to the respiratory system which will certainly manifest in poorer health outcomes over time). Further still, even if you aren't likely to be seriously affected by the virus, taking the vaccine helps to reduce your risk of catching it in the first place and thus spreading it to others who might be less healthy--to be honest, if you were the only person who was impacted I wouldn't care, but this is solidly a case where the decisions you make affect others.
I really support people who are affected by the increasing partisanship of our institutions, but I do wish they would find a better way to vent their frustrations.
There is no reason for me to get the vaccine at all. I'm not at risk of contracting covid. That's the overriding reason. It's a pharmaceutical I do not need.
That the push is being made so insanely is just another reason to avoid it--we don't know what the actual motivations are of those pushing it, but we do know it's not primarily public health, otherwise as I stated, those 120mm Americans with robust antibodies from recovering from covid infection would never be considered any different from the vaccinated.
It's not partisanship, because as far as I can tell, public health authorities have debased themselves and lost all credibility completely in the past 1.5 years, and this is across the spectrum of global health agencies. The American political parties are in union and aside from a couple dissenters are in on the insanity.
When someone or thing hides their motivations, doing what they want seems crazy to me.
I think this probably falls to the normal debate of the balance between "but who will pay for them?" and "it costs every nation to not have all nations vaccinated"
